The Walking Dead: Invasion (3 page)

The preacher has already started toward the derelict church, his Glock gripped tightly in his huge hand, dangling at his side like a calling card. “This here's the Rapture, boys,” he murmurs casually, as though informing them it's Presidents' Day. “There ain't no such thing as ‘church' anymore. It's all up for grabs.”

The two young men glance at each other for a moment before hurrying to catch up with the preacher.

 

TWO

They approach the property from the rear, through a grove of sickly eucalyptus trees that mark the outer edges of the church's lot. Jeremiah can smell the cloying stench of menthol and ammonia in the air as he creeps across the weed-whiskered gravel, careful not to make too much noise when his big boots crunch on the pea stones. The light in the chapel's rear window has dwindled with the advent of the morning sun, and the roar of crickets has faded. Now the silence lies like a pall over the area, making Jeremiah's heart throb in his ears.

He pauses behind a tree about twenty-five feet away from the lighted window.

With a few quick hand signals, the preacher rouses the two younger men, who are hiding behind a nearby oak. Stephen limps as he moves out from behind cover, carrying the pistol-grip shotgun against his solar plexus like a vestigial appendage. Reese moves in behind his friend, wide-eyed and jumpy, flinching at twinges of pain. These two are not exactly the crème de la crème of the world's new survivor class, Jeremiah realizes, nor are they the greatest disciples imaginable for a spiritual leader such as himself. But perhaps, the preacher should see these young men as they truly are: clay to be molded in this new world, this hell on earth. As Jeremiah's old man used to say, quoting Thessalonians 5:1, “
The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night, and while people are saying, Peace and safety, destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape.
”

Jeremiah issues another signal, stabbing a finger at the rear of the building.

One by one, the three men move in toward the small, wood-sided annex off the rear of the chapel—Jeremiah in the lead, his pistol gripped in both hands, muzzle downward. The closer they get, and the more the sun dawns over the horizon, the more they realize something isn't right. The windows of the rear building—the rectory or the deacon's quarters, maybe—are lined in aluminum foil. The screen door has been ripped off its spindle, and the inner door has been nailed shut and crisscrossed with lumber. The stench of walkers permeates the air, and it gets stronger as they approach.

Jeremiah reaches the building first, and he gently stands with his back against the boarded door, signaling to the others with a finger to his lips.

They approach as quietly as possible, stepping lightly over the trash and dead leaves that are skittering across the back deck on the morning breeze. Stephen stands on one side of the preacher, Reese on the other, both keeping weapons at the ready. The preacher reaches down to his scuffed Wellington boot and pulls a twelve-inch Randall knife from the inner lining. He carefully wedges the point under one of the boards near the door's latch and yanks.

The door proves stubborn. Jeremiah pries at it repeatedly with the knife—making more racket than he cares to, but he has no choice; they would make even more noise if they tried to break through one of the windows. The nails give slightly, the rusty squeal sounding amplified in the hushed air of dawn. He has no idea what they're about to find inside this building, but he's fairly certain now that both humans as well as walkers inhabit this place.

Walkers don't build fires; and the average survivor with access to soap and water doesn't usually smell like death warmed over.

The door finally gives, and the two younger men move in closer, guns up now.

They enter one at a time.

*   *   *

They find themselves in an empty room, illuminated by dim, yellow, incandescent light and smelling of stale smoke and BO. Jeremiah slowly crosses the floor, his heavy boots making the floorboards creak. He makes note of the small potbelly stove still radiating the heat of dying embers, the braided rug stained with old blood, the solitary cot in one corner, the rolltop desk littered with tea bags, chafing dishes, candy wrappers, gossip magazines, empty MD 40-40 bottles, and crumpled cigarette packs.

He goes over to the desk and looks down at a display of playing cards arranged in the classic solitaire pattern. It looks like somebody—very likely a single person—was here only a moment ago and left in a hurry. A noise from behind an inner door suddenly yanks at Jeremiah's attention. He whirls. Reese and Stephen both stand across the room, gazing sheepishly back at their leader.

Again, Jeremiah puts a forefinger to his lips, giving them the
shush
sign.

The two men wait by the door, eyes aglow with nervous tension. On the other side of the door, shuffling noises build—the telltale, languid dragging of clumsy feet. There's also the reek of mortified flesh as acrid as methane, and it's getting stronger. Jeremiah recognizes the noises as well as the odors—a number of undead trapped in an enclosed space—and he turns and points to Stephen's shotgun.

A few silent hand gestures later, Stephen understands that he's supposed to blow the lock off the door and Reese is supposed to back them both up. Neither young man is very happy about this plan. Stephen looks ashen, and Reese is drenched in sweat, both of them nursing severe wounds and perhaps even internal bleeding. Neither seems very gung ho about fighting off an undetermined number of biters. But Jeremiah is an irresistible leader, the mere look in his eyes enough to quell any dissension in the ranks. He holds three fingers up. He begins to count down.

Three, two …

A pale blue hand covered with mold bursts through a weak spot in the lumber.

*   *   *

Nothing in reality ever seems to play out the way Stephen Pembry imagines it will. As a sickly, skinny kid growing up in Macon, Georgia, he lived the life of a pint-sized Walter Mitty—always rehearsing his heroic exploits standing up to bullies, saving fair maidens from evildoers, and generally being a badass. But life on the playground can quickly short-circuit your fantasies, and many black eyes later, Stephen turned to God and free weights to build up his resistance to the real world. He was never going to be Superman, but he would always be able to defend himself.

Unfortunately, the devil has a way of throwing curves at a person, and ever since the plague broke out, Stephen Pembry has constantly been thwarted. Like the time he got that woman killed in Augusta, or the time he dropped that fresh clip of ammo down the sewer grating and got chewed out for days by Brother Jeremiah. Even now, Stephen feels the world around him quickly gaining an advantage.

He trips on his backward-shuffling feet and falls to the floor. The pain in his ribs explodes, the injury jostled by the impact. The Mossberg goes spinning. At the same time, another pair of hands have thrust their way through the busted slats of the door, and Jeremiah has pulled something from his boot. Stephen watches as the dull gleam of a Buck knife streaks through the air. A butcher trimming a stubborn ham hock couldn't have amputated the gray, fleshy extremities faster or more decisively. Jeremiah drives the blade through tissue and cartilage, sawing through bone.

Hands flop to the floor as neatly as knotted limbs being pruned.

Stephen watches. He tries to sit up. His gorge clenches and burns and threatens to upchuck the paltry contents of his stomach. Things are moving quickly now. Reanimated hands are flopping around Stephen like fish on a boat's deck, slowly growing still as the electrical impulses from reanimated central nervous systems drain out. Stephen's vision blurs, his mind swimming, dizziness gripping him as his wounded lungs labor to get air.

Jeremiah has already scooped the fallen shotgun from the floor, pumping shells into its breech with a single jerk of his arm as he turns back to the door. Stephen manages to lever himself back up to a standing position, kicking the ghastly hands out of the way. Jeremiah slams a work boot into the door, and the door implodes, revealing the interior of the dark chapel.

Stephen gets a fleeting glimpse of the sanctuary before the first blast shatters the tableau.

Once a quaint little nave of burnished pine pews, maroon carpet, and stained glass panels depicting scenes of the Resurrection, the chapel now resembles an abattoir from the ninth circle of hell. The dead number in the dozens—maybe as many as forty or fifty—most of them chained to the pews with makeshift tethers of rope and electrical cord. They react to the light of the outer room as if Jeremiah had just turned over a rock and exposed a colony of vermin.

Insensate faces jerk toward the noise, their metallic eyes reflecting movement. Most of the parishioners sport their Sunday best—off-the-rack woolen suits and bargain-basement sundresses, fancy hats and wilted corsages—and the sight of their formal garb seizes Stephen's heart. Most of the dead appear to have once been African-American, although the lividity and gray rigor mortis of death have homogenized and camouflaged their original ethnicity. Stranger still, in that terrible instant before the first flash of the 12-gauge, Stephen sees that somebody apparently tried to minister to these beings after they reanimated.

Hymnals, their bindings cracked, lie open in front of each captive like dead birds. Morsels of food, pieces of roadkill, or unidentifiable human remains are scattered in the pews next to each being. Candles still burn in the sanctuary on advent stands at the front of the room on the modest little altar. Somewhere the buzz of a live microphone drones. The air smells of mortified sewage perfumed with acrid disinfectant.

It almost appears as though an outside party has tried in vain to keep the daily services going.

Stephen gets one final glance at Jeremiah before the air lights up, and the look on the preacher's face is horrifying: a mixture of sorrow, rage, loss, madness, and regret—the look of a man confronting the merciless abyss. Then the shooting starts.

The first blast flashes and takes the closest walker down in a puff of cranial tissue, the shell ripping through skull and taking a chink out of the lintel above the door. Three subsequent blasts boom in the flickering gloom, making Stephen's ears ring and vanquishing the other three creatures who had apparently managed to slip free of their bonds. Already covered with blowback, his anguished face stippled and spattered, Jeremiah now moves deeper into the chapel and starts in on the others.

It takes only a few minutes—the air flashing like a fireworks display—as Jeremiah goes from pew to pew, either vaporizing skulls or thrusting his Randall knife through putrefied nasal cavities before the parishioners even get a chance to bite at the air. Stephen staggers toward the open doorway to get a better view, and he notices Reese just inside the chapel entrance, crouched on the floor, gaping in horror at the proceedings.

Jeremiah has the strangest look on his face now as he finishes off the last of the monsters with hard, quick slashes of the knife. The Mossberg has been emptied, eight shells of tactical shot peppering the walls behind heaps of moldering flesh. Completely slimy with blood, his eyes burning with inscrutable emotions, the preacher looks almost beatific as he dispatches the last reanimated corpse.

For one terrible moment, watching all this from the doorway, Stephen Pembry thinks of a man having an orgasm. The preacher lets out a voluptuous sigh of relief as he impales the skull of an elderly woman in a frilly dress made of ruffles and chintz. The crone sags against the back of her pew. She was once somebody's mother, somebody's neighbor. She may have once baked cookies for her grandchildren, served her famous bread pudding at ice cream socials, and laid to rest her beloved husband of forty-seven years in the kudzu-lined cemetery out behind the rectory.

The preacher pauses to catch his breath. Staring down at the woman, he starts to silently pray. His head is bowed, his lips moving, when all at once he abruptly stops and looks up and narrows his eyes. His head cocks to one side as he listens closely to something in another part of the building. At last, he fixes his gaze on Reese and says softly, “You hear that?”

Reese manages a slow shake of his head.

The preacher looks up at the railings of the choir loft twenty feet above them. He reaches for his knife, pulling the bloodstained instrument from his belt. Then he signals for his men to follow.

*   *   *

They find the woman in the second-floor bathroom, just down a narrow passageway from the choir loft. A portly African-American gal in a filthy gingham mourning dress, ancient tennis shoes, and a hairnet, she huddles inside a stall, shivering with terror as the men enter the ladies' room. Jeremiah kicks open the stall door and sees the woman's enormous derriere sticking out from behind the commode. “Come on outta there, ma'am,” Jeremiah says softly but firmly, as though addressing a family pet.

The woman twists around and pokes a small .38 caliber police special in his face. “Back off, motherfucker! I'll use it, I swear!”

“Whoa!—WHOA!” Jeremiah raises both hands, eyebrows rising as Reese and Stephen move in behind him with muzzles up and ready. “Let's all take a breath now.… All right … no cause to go all O.K. Corral on each other.”

“Them people down there,” the woman says, and then stops herself, her expression faltering. Her gun lowers. She slumps, a single tear tracking down her plump face, making a leech trail across her ashy brown cheek. “Them people … they was … they was my family … they was all in my choir and they … they needed to go … I know that.… I just didn't have the heart.”

Jeremiah holsters his knife inside his boot, and kneels beside her. “Take a deep breath, Sister.”

The woman starts to sob. She drops her gun. Her head lolls forward and her tears and saliva drip into the toilet. “Oh Lordy … Lordy … what a life.”